Aragón moved wordlessly, soft-footing through the dormant house. He led Evan upstairs and into the study. Fabric couch, bookshelves, a built-in desk with nothing on it. Not a true working space. Above the couch a wood-handled rifleman’s dagger was framed in Lucite for no apparent reason. A rose-gold-and-white marble bar cart in the corner hosted a variety of high-end liquor bottles that seemed at odds with the rest of the middle-class decor.
Aragón noted Evan’s gaze and said, “Gifts.”
“Of course.”
“I could use an amigo de borrachera,” Aragón said. “Now more than ever. Do you drink?”
“I’ve been known to have a sip now and then.”
“Should we indulge?”
Evan leaned against the desk. “I could use a finger.”
“I have some fine mezcal with worm salt from Oaxaca.”
“I prefer vodka.”
“Vodka,” Aragón said dismissively. “I know, I know, it has the most impurities removed. They say that makes it cleaner, but I think it makes it boring. Give me impurities any day. Peat, smoke, wood.” A surprisingly warm smile. “But you’re the guest.” He lifted a black bottle with bold red lettering. “Have you had Blavod? It’s a German vodka. Black. Like our hearts.”
He poured a bit of the ebony liquid into two crystal old-fashioned glasses, handed one to Evan, and they clinked.
“It derives its color from catechu,” Aragón said. “A heartwood extract from Burmese acacia trees. But that’s probably more information than you care to know.”
“You’d be surprised.”
The vodka washed down Evan’s throat, coated the inside of his stomach, seating him in his body. He exhaled in full for the first time in nearly forty-eight hours, and Aragón matched him, sinking down onto the couch.
Evan said, “Bit of spice in the aftertaste.”
“The biggest trick alcohol ever pulled was making us believe we like the way it tastes.” Aragón held the glass aloft, peered through the inky wash. “What if we called it what it was? Medicine. Panacea. Tinctures to turn the dial of our moods this way or that.”
Evan stared down into his drink, thought of what little he knew of his mother and half brother, the current of alcoholism that ran through his genes like a live wire. Discipline and force of habit kept his affection for liquor in check, but he felt the draw of it in his cells now and again. To loosen, to unclench, to give up and give in. From the way Aragón eyed the cart, he knew that his host heard the siren call as well at times like these.
“What’s with the framed dagger?” Evan asked.
Aragón unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off one shoulder. A thin white scar carved six inches to the left of his sternum just beneath the collarbone where someone had gone for the axillary artery.
“Back in the day,” Aragón said. “When I was still—how would you say it?—more hands-on. A transaction that went wrong. It didn’t go deep.” He smiled. “Not on me, at least.”
“So you framed it? Like your first dollar bill?”
“No. To commemorate the price of my stupidity. And his.” A scattering of gray hair covered Aragón’s chest, the musculature surprisingly pronounced for his age. “I came home, and Belicia about took my head off. Anjelina”—at the mention of his daughter’s name, a shadow moved across his face—“she was a newborn. So my wife demanded changes.”
“And you obeyed?”
“‘Obeyed’? That is not a word we use in our marriage. I listened.” He tasted his vodka. “My home has always been my refuge. Even when Belicia and I fought, even when we threw plates and screamed, that’s been true. My wife has kept me safe from my own worst self. But never by trying to neuter me. Not like the games your suburbanites play. Mommy wives and their little-boy husbands. No, I didn’t obey. I waited until I understood why she is almost always right.”
“Almost always?”
“I have to hold out hope.”
Leaning over, Aragón gave himself another healthy pour. Swung the bottle in Evan’s direction, but Evan declined.
“It sounds like a cliché. That my wife is the wisest person I know. But, my friend”—and here Aragón leaned forward and grew intense, even threatening—“you haven’t met my wife.” Amusement reshaped his face, that unorthodox handsomeness showing through. Leaning back on the cushions, he took a gulp, let the liquid swirl in his mouth.
Evan felt it, too, a touch of heat about his temples.
“The measure of a man is how tough he can be to the world and how sensitive he can be to women.” Aragón took another sip. “Women are fucking Swiss Army knives. Throw anything at them and they figure out which part of them to use to fix it, care for it, make it better. They can hear if a baby’s cough is just a cough, can smell if something’s burning in the next room. They can see when our arrogance is serving us. And point out when it’s not.”
His tone was angry, but Evan sensed what was beneath it, a current of remorse, self-disgust. Grief.
Aragón was looking at Evan, but his eyes were glazed, distant. “I have a wife who used to dance in the kitchen while she cooked dinner. When I was in my right mind, I’d sit and just … marvel at her. And before you get modern on me, she could do the same thing while running a corporation or performing open-heart surgery. She could do anything. Women don’t have to compete with men. Men aren’t fit to kneel at their altar.” He stared into his glass. “But I wore her down. I wore her down with my childish needs. No—she wore herself down trying to make me less stupid. And I dressed up my cowardice by calling it manliness.”
Evan thought of his conversation with Mia, the postcoital flush still high on her cheeks, her body warm against his. The coming dinner at her brother’s house, the day-to-day realities that ground men down. But also—maybe—that could build them up.
Aragón stared at him, his eyes brimming. He blinked hard a few times, heavy eyelids holding everything back. “A few years ago, I could have gone fully legal. I could have had marijuana grow houses as big as Costcos, teams of lawyers making sure every t was crossed. I have enough money already. Nobody would get hurt. But it’s force of habit, yes? Chasing the thrill. Feeling like a big shot.” He sneered. “El Patrón.” The last of the black liquid drained into his mouth. “My choices and my choices alone put Anjelina at risk. Along with everything else.”
Genuine curiosity stirred in Evan’s chest. Aragón’s flaws were prodigious, perhaps fatally so, but he knew things Evan did not. For an instant he felt how much he missed Jack, the first person who’d treated him with care. There’d been a comfort in knowing that there was someone ahead of him on the climb, who’d seen a broader vista.
Aragón reached with a groan to offer the bottle again, and Evan told himself it would be rude to refuse. The sloppy pour splashed a few drops onto his knuckles.
“I considered myself a wise man,” Aragón said. “But I didn’t understand humility. Why it’s adjacent to wisdom. Maybe even the same thing.”
“How so?”
Aragón lifted his glass, the black vodka threatening to slosh over the top. “My daughter’s kidnapping has forced me to confront the full measure of my blindness. And maybe now—finally—I will find the courage not to turn away. If I confront myself for the fool I am without drowning in shame, then maybe I will be granted the wisdom to make things right.”
And there it was, the slightest tug at Evan’s insides, a recalibration of the man sitting before him. Was it possible that he actually liked this man, an accomplished drug dealer and innovator of illicit markets? What did that mean about Evan’s hard-and-fast rules, the carved-in-stone Commandments? There was a softness in Aragón’s face, a vulnerability behind the eyes.
Aragón shifted on the couch, elbows on his knees, glass dangling in both hands. “I feel like a hermit crab. You ever have one of those growing up?”
“Those were for rich kids.”
Aragón smirked, but there was no meanness in it. “As they grow, they have to shed their shells to search for new ones, bigger ones, that will accommodate who they might become. I feel like I’ve outgrown my old shell, but I can’t find a new one. It’s like I’m at the bottom of the ocean scuttling across the sand, predators swirling overhead.” He drank again. “Talk, talk, talk. Listen to me. None of this is helping us find my daughter.” He screwed a fist into one eye and yawned. “I need to sleep. I will give you everything I know about the Leones tomorrow.”
He offered his hand.
Evan shook it. Aragón’s grip was firm but not too firm, the confident grip of a man with nothing to prove.
Evan said, “You have until I find her and bring her back.”
“Have until then to do what?”
“Figure out how to leave all this behind. The drugs, the trafficking, the money laundering.”
Aragón’s cheeks bunched high around that bulbous nose, his face raw and rough like something carved from mahogany. “Or what?”
“Or I’ll come for you.”
“Ah,” Aragón said. “Only you get to decide who lives, who dies. Only you know what is right. Only you have the unassailable moral compass.”
“No. Not just me. But I can choose what I do. And for whom.”
“And you don’t find me worthy?”
“No,” Evan said. “But your daughter is.”
Aragón grinned, though his teeth were clenched. “Quite a position you put me in,” he said. “Given my love for her.”
“Your love for her,” Evan said. “Maybe that’s what will save you.”
“From you?”
“No.”
Aragón blinked at him a few times. Some kind of understanding passed between them, but it was too complicated to put into words.
Evan set down his glass, half full. “I should get going.”
“Nonsense, nonsense.” Aragón moved to the closet and racked open the flimsy slatted bifold doors. He removed a set of sheets and a pillow, tossed them on the desk. “Come, help me pull out the sofa bed.”
“No, thank you. I won’t stay here.”
Aragón slid the cushions off the couch and strained to tug out the folding bed. “The motel in town is shitty. Trust me, I own it. You stay here, grab a few hours of sleep. We have much to review and can’t waste time with you driving off and breaking back in to hold a knife to my throat.”
Aragón threw one side of a fitted sheet across the bed to Evan. “Come on, come on.” He gestured once more, his manner impatient and disarming, and Evan found himself dumbly listening, pulling the elastic corners into place.
Aragón laid down the top sheet and blanket while Evan chinned the pillow into a case.
He had never made a bed with someone else. The act was oddly intimate.
“Bathroom’s up the hall on the left,” Aragón said. “Fresh towels on the rod, toothbrush in the drawer. Do you need a mint on your pillow? A burned fentanyl tablet?”
“The black vodka and Dagger of Damocles should suffice.”
Aragón came around the end of the bed, crowded in the small room, and rested his powerful hands on Evan’s shoulders. “Thank you. I’m glad we didn’t kill each other.”
He embraced Evan, wrapping him in a bear hug that Evan was too stunned to return. Then he was gone.
Evan stood a moment, pillow in hand, replaying the bizarre domestic episode in his head to determine if it had actually happened.
It seemed it had.
By the time he’d stripped off his shirt, kicked off his boots, and moved out into the hall, the master door was closed. He walked quietly to the bathroom, where he found a toothbrush in a drawer as promised. He brushed his teeth and then washed his face with French milled soap shaped like a snail. Feeling insufficiently settled to shower, he pulled off his shirt and rinsed off in the sink, then dried himself with a fluffy lavender towel.
When he emerged, slinging his shirt over his shoulder, one of the doors in the hall was slightly ajar.
Belicia’s.
There was no more than a few inches of black at the doorjamb. Had she cracked the door to listen to him? Or had air from a vent in her room suctioned it open?
He set his bare feet down silently on the carpet, heel-to-toe easing toward Belicia’s room.
He stopped just outside. The black interior gave up nothing. He was at a disadvantage backlit here in the hall, a welcome target for bullets or carbon-fiber arrows or a tomahawk throwing ax if someone got creative. And yet curiosity pinned him to the spot. The air leaking through the gap smelled of air-conditioner freon and something else, something vaguely medicinal.
He strained to listen, his face inches away. He sensed the air tremble, and then the door pushed shut abruptly, the brusque snap of wood in the frame startling him.
He stood a moment bare-chested, drops of sink water cool across his chest, embarrassed to realize that his breathing had quickened from the scare.
Moving back to the makeshift guest room, he sat cross-legged on the bed, debating whether he had it in him to meditate. He didn’t feel like it in the least, which was usually a sign that he needed to.
But every time he tried to focus, his thoughts pulled out of shape. To being a guest in someone’s home and the unfamiliar mix of vulnerability and obligation that elicited in him. To Aragón’s mysterious wife who’d soft-slammed the door in his face. To La Tía also slumbering right up the hall. To Anjelina wherever she was sleeping or lying awake in terror.
His mind raced, the alcohol converting to sugar in his bloodstream, his mind jumping across the mission, picking at details, yawing wide and zooming in. The photos from the party, laughter and lipstick. The saccharine cinnamon scent of Anjelina’s room. That caravan of dark SUVs conveying her away like a stolen princess.
He couldn’t catch the rhythm of his respiration, couldn’t reduce himself to his breath.
The sheets were not his sheets, and the bed was slightly uneven, the taste of the air unfamiliar. He’d been in plenty of unknown places, but being part of an unknown place, not just a trespasser moving through, felt intensely uncomfortable. He pictured the books downstairs ordered by height except for that one, sticking up out of place, an affront to its neighbors.
He gave up on meditating, turned off the light, and drew the covers over him.
Still that fucking book disrupted his thoughts.
Five minutes passed. Then ten. Above his head the entombed dagger stared down at him, and he stared back.
Finally he slipped from bed, tiptoed down the stairs, crept into the living room, and confronted the offending hardcover on the bookcase.
He took it off the shelf, slid it along the line of ascending spines until he found its proper spot, and then seated it in place.
He exhaled. Without knowing it he’d broken a sweat, but staring at the books restored something in him to order.
He headed back upstairs.
All the doors were closed, including Belicia’s.
He returned to the study, closed and locked the door behind him, and climbed back into bed. At last ready for sleep, he shut his eyes, laying one hand on his chest and one on his stomach, letting his breath rise through his palms.
He was just drifting off when he felt a vibration in his pocket.
The RoamZone.
Caller ID showed Joey.
He clicked to pick up, but before he could say anything, her voice came in a rush, strangled and tight and devoid of its usual sardonic edge.
“I found her,” she said. “Jesus, X. She’s already dead.”